@AlKohout: "had it done over 15 years ago..and wonder if it can fail later.  I'm over 50
yrs old now and wonder if the early procedures hold up..."
    @davidbrown: "Hi,
<quote>
50
I am curious as to *why* you are asking this at this late stage. I'm
assuming you've been having unprotected intercourse for 15 years, and I'm
assuming that to the best of your knowledge you haven't fathered any/more
kids since. With this in mind, I wonder what prompts you to wonder this.
Failures do happen. No method of BC is 100%. Vasectomy failures tend to
happen early on in the majority of cases. In actual fact, there is some
dispute on if they are failures in the sense of spontaneous rejoining, or
failures in the sense of it never cleared in the first place.
Late failures are rare, but do occur. If a wife concieves after hubby has
had the snip, that story tends to make the news. If it was as a result of a
split condom, or pill failure it doesn't seem to have any news value. This
demonstrates the rarity.
Interestingly, there isn't a standard way of measuring failure! There are
two ways that are used in the main - counting the number of pregnancies that
occur, and classing semen analysis failures after a set time as the failure
rate. There is debate about which of these methods gives a truer picture.
The other interesting thing is that where DNA sampling is used to ascertain
parentage of post-vasectomy babies, the incidence of proven failure drops by
a fair whack. Odd that.
I'd say that there is no evidence that earlier procedures are more prone to
failure than later ones. I'd also make the point that 15 years in the
history of vasectomy is nothing. The first medical study on vasectomy was
published in 1830, and vasectomy reversal is coming up to it's 100th
birthday (in 2007 to be precise).
I'd not worry about it. If you *were* going to get someone pregnant you
would have done this by now.
David
<url>"
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